Top 50 New Restaurants - Metropole, Cincinnati, OH

Open-hearth cooking is huge right now, but few are doing it as well as Michael Paley. The chef came from Louisville to Cincinnati to tend to the blazing wood fire in the Metropole’s old-meets-new, mosaic-tiled dining room. Seasonal American dishes from kale salad to octopus to a hunk of sirloin all get a taste of the flames. Even foie gras is taken out of the frying pan and put into the fire—cooked 80 percent through on a steel plancha in the smoky hearth, then finished on a cast-iron grate (to incredible effect).